Wyoming Humanities Network

Continuing our sneak peek at the upcoming Humanities Matter! conference, October 23-24 at Central Wyoming College in Riverton, today I would like to introduce an exciting panel: Humanities Engaged: The Art of Regional Change, which will be led by four representatives from the Art of Regional Change (ARC) program at the University of California, Davis. Let’s meet them, shall we?

The People

jesikah maria ross is an educator, mediamaker, and community cultural development practitioner. She is the co-founder and director of the Art of Regional Change, which brings together scholars, students, artists, and community groups to collaborate on media arts projects that strengthen communities, generate public scholarship and inform regional decision-making.   She recently co-directed Saving The Sierra: Voices of Conservation in Action, an award winning multimedia project that uses public radio, the Web, and citizen storytelling activities to document community efforts to conserve the culture, economy, and environment of the Sierra Nevada mountain range of California. Her last film MAQUILAPOLIS (Sound Recordist, Community Engagement Director) made in collaboration with workers in Tijuana’s assembly factories aired nationally on PBS in October, 2006.  jesikah co-founded the National Association of Media Arts & Culture’s Leadership Institute, helped birth KDRT 95.7 LPFM, launched the Bioneers Reel Change Youth Media Program and designs participatory media projects for organizations in Europe, Africa, and the United States.

Mike Ziser is an Assistant Professor of English. His research addresses questions about the image and agency of nonhuman nature in North American writing and visual arts, engaging along the way with ecocriticism, agrarianism, eco-phenomenology, food studies, science studies, media studies, religious studies, and bioregionalist thought and practice. As inaugural director of the UC Davis Environmental Humanities Research supercluster, Professor Ziser has worked to bring faculty and graduate students from different disciplines together to discuss environment-related work of common interest. As an Art of Regional Change faculty fellow, Mike has also begun to try to use the university’s intellectual, technical, and social capital to forge links with communities in the Blue Mountain district of Calaveras county and, closer to home, the Bryte and Broderick neighborhoods of West Sacramento. His current household animal census includes two kids, two dogs, two fish, four chickens, fifty silk moths, and approximately 100,000 honey bees.

Patsy Eubanks Owens is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture. The overall focus of her work concerns the influence of social factors on the design of places. Her basic tenet is that the designer’s base of ideas – and, consequently, the design itself – is enhanced when the values, patterns, and activities of the community who will use a place are understood and considered. In particular, her research focuses on two areas — adolescents and the physical environment and community participation in design. Her research and design activities on adolescents include examining what places teenagers value and why, how they use places, how places can influence the adults that teens become, public response to teenagers’ use of place, and how to design places to meet the needs of this specific age group. Her research and creative activities regarding community participation include examining and developing public participation strategies, applying these strategies to design projects, and providing service-learning experiences for students.

Holly George has been working for University of California Cooperative Extension since 1983, when she was hired as the first female livestock advisor in the state. After working a few years in the East Bay (Oakland, Berkeley, Livermore) doing livestock, range and land use policy, she transferred to Plumas-Sierra Counties in the northeastern part of the state — the sole advisor in two very rural counties. In addition to a number of conventional livestock and range management programs, she has worked closely with the agricultural, environmental and regulatory communities to develop proactive programs dealing with water quality, niche meat marketing, public and private land use policies and agricultural diversification, namely agriculture and nature tourism. She has always encouraged her clientele to interact with policy makers so they could hear first-hand from the people stewarding and making a living from the land. Her interactions with jesikah maria ross on another project led to a partnership between the UC Davis Humanities Institute’s Art of Regional Change and UC Cooperative Extension to garner funds and local residents to tell their stories about agricultural viability and resource stewardship in the Passion for the Land project. Holly is an outgoing woman, aspiring artist (woodworking, watercolors and wool…to name a few) and the oldest of eight children.

The Panel

The Art of Regional Change (ARC) at the University of California, Davis, creates “community cultural development projects that involve faculty, students, and community members in collaborative, place-based storytelling.” In Humanities Engaged: The Art of Regional Change, the four ARC representatives will introduce the ARC model of community engagement with humanities, social science, and arts faculty in ways that benefit both faculty and communities. Using ARC-produced video clips, the panel will introduce ARC’s first three projects. The panel will also address both the challenges and the opportunities of public scholarship and college-community engagement from the perspectives of faculty, community cultural developer, and community partner.

Following the panel, ARC panelists will also be available to work with participants during the open space brainstorming session, which will give participants the opportunity to begin developing their own projects that bring together Wyoming’s colleges and communities. More about that next week!